Labor Department Publishes Union Documents Online
By Kirstin Downey Grimsley Washington Post Staff Writer Thursday, June 13, 2002; Page E02 The Labor Department has begun posting on its Web site internal financial documents from hundreds of labor unions around the country, including information on their net assets, officials' salaries, and how much they spend on office expenses and professional fees. Department spokeswoman Sue Hensley said the initiative to post labor-management records, also known as LMs, reflects the department's efforts to promote greater transparency and make more information available to the public. Until now, people who wanted to know more about union finances had to visit a Labor Department office to review the paperwork or seek records from the unions themselves. "We feel it's positive for union members and union democracy for people to know how their funds are being spent," Hensley said. But some labor unions aren't too happy about it, first because many would have preferred not to see the information disclosed but also because the department decided not to post the corresponding information from employers on the Web as well. Employers are required to inform the department about how much they pay labor organizations and management consultants that provide expertise on how to handle labor-organizing efforts. Union activists argue that the employers spend large amounts each year in efforts to block workers' organizing efforts but that people who are interested in seeing those financial statements still must go in person to the Labor Department to retrieve them. "It's very discriminatory," said Jon Hiatt, general counsel of the AFL-CIO. "They are putting union LMs online, but not employer or management consultant LMs online at the same time." Even some groups that have pushed for greater union disclosure to the public, and who say that unions have sought to block Web access to avoid making disclosures, say it would have been more fair if the department had posted both sets of documents at the same time. "They should put as much up there as there is interest for," said Ken Boehm, chairman of the National Legal and Policy Center, a nonprofit organization that disseminates information about union corruption. He said that current technology makes it easy to put even large documents on the Web. Hensley said the department intends to place the management-related information online at some time "in the near future" but lacks the resources to do so at this time. She said it takes a while to get these programs implemented, noting that the department first received a specific appropriation for putting the records online in 1998. "This train was down the track a long time ago," she said. The International Brotherhood of Teamsters, the largest single affiliate union to the AFL-CIO, said it had no objection to placing its information on the Web because the union considers it public information anyway. "The Teamsters are a democratic organization," said Bret Caldwell, a spokesman for the Teamsters. "Our books are open. Our members are fully aware of our financial status and our fiscal planning, so this doesn't affect how we do business." According to a Labor Department filing on the Teamsters, a 342-page document, the union had $101 million in assets at the end of 2000 and $80.5 million in liabilities. It paid $2.7 million in taxes that year and spent $5.8 million on educational and publicity expenses, $17.4 million in office and administrative expenses, and $2.6 million on contributions, gifts and grants. With its budget of over $200,000 a year, the Teamsters file what is known as an LM-2 form. Smaller unions file LM-3s and LM-4s. The Newspaper Editors union in Random Lake, Wis., for example, which has 31 members, reported that it had a $5,751 in assets in 2000, according to the Labor Department's Web site. The Licensed Practical Nurses Association of Illinois, in Springfield, charges its 525 members dues of $80 per year, according to its filing. Its seven officers received $155 in disbursements for their expenses in 2000. The LM records have been required of unions and managements since 1959 by the Landrum-Griffin Act, which sought to find legislative remedies for a host of union-and-management-related problems. It sought to ensure union democracy and prevent self-dealing and to reveal the financial extent of management efforts to block unions from forming. The National Legal and Policy Center, which identifies itself as a conservative group, says the law needs to be toughened because some unions are not disclosing as much information as they should and alleges specifically that union money being used for political causes is being misrepresented as general operating expenses. More than 90 percent of union political contributions go to Democratic candidates.
